I looked desperately down every hall and through every door, begging to find a room that looked like it would have the terminal. I was all shaky and jittery, and so terribly nervous. Window… terminal… window… terminal… window!
Aizel had taken me up a flight of stairs, around a bunch of twists and turns, and straight past about a bazillion guards – or at least it seemed that way, but there it was; the terminal room.
I was happy, however it seemed that I had gotten my hopes up a little too soon, and it only made sense that Lace would have at least one man to guard the room – in fact, he had two. They were both young, probably in their twenties, and they seemed bright enough, and bored as hell from sitting around doing nothing.
When they spotted Aizel and I, their expressions changed and they stood up and faced us. The one on the left was wearing a baseball cap, and he was the first one to talk. “Excuse me,” he said, not impolitely. “No one is to enter this room, President Lace’s orders.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” replied Aizel in his boyish tone. “We appear to have gotten lost.”
“Are you new here?” The other guard asked. “What division are you from?”
I saw the hesitation in Aizel’s eyes, and the strain of his decision – he didn’t know how to answer because he didn’t know what divisions existed under Lace’s control. If he said he belonged to one that did exist, then we’d have to leave and the guards would probably call that division. If he said that we belonged to a division that didn’t exist, well, that was even worse.
“Look,” Aizel said innocently, “we’ll just head back the way we came and…”
“What division are you from?” they asked again.
If these two were trained then they might have noticed Aizel’s hand drift over to the gun in the back of his pants, but they were only young and innocent, and they didn’t see a thing. He’s going to kill them! I realised. There’s no other way!
The second that one of the guards made a move to reach for their holster Aizel drew and fired. The bullet collided with the hand of the guard on the left – the one with the baseball cap – and it tore through his fingers and knuckles like they were made of paper – only paper didn’t bleed so much. Blood splattered across the ground and terminal desk, his gun had gone flying, and the poor guy screamed in terrified anguish as he gaped at his mutilated hand.
By this stage Aizel had the other guard at pun point, and he instinctively raised his hands, unbuttoned his holster, and dropped it to the ground. His pale face and placid eyes were all that were needed to tell me that he was afraid.
I was in a terrifying daze for a moment from the sight of all the blood and the piercing screams of that poor handless guard. When I looked at him I saw Brakewater, lifeless and bloodied, and I began to feel nauseous, but I returned to normal out of necessity. “Aizel, they would have heard that.”
Aizel’s eyes were fixed on his hostage, but he heard what I said. “I know,” he replied. “I’m almost done here.” He indicated by pointing his weapon that he wanted the other guard to leave. “Leave the room and close the door, there’s no need to be a hero on our behalf, all we want is the terminal.”
The frightened guard looked at his friend in shock – the poor guy was still squirming and crying. He jittered. “But…”
“No buts,” Aizel stated. “Your friend stays with us, I promise we’ll look after him. Now go!”
The guard did as he was told and shuffled out of the room, closing the door on his way out. When it was done, Aizel ran over, turned the massive metal lock thing, and as far as I could tell, we were relatively safe for a while.
“Abigail, what the hell are you doing?” Aizel shouted. “Get to the terminal!”
I jumped at the sudden ferocity in his voice, so I ran over, nearly slipped in a puddle of blood, and then I was standing over the terminal. The computer screen was weird to look at and all the buttons were overwhelmingly confusing, but surprisingly I actually had used something like this before – when I was with the professor.
As I was working on the terminal I noticed that Aizel had put down his gun and taken a first aid kit from the wall. He sat down quietly next to the guard with the bleeding hand and he began to tend to the wound, all the while talking to him in a soft apologetic voice. I knew full well that Aizel should have killed both of them – and that was no fluke, Aizel had aimed for the guard’s hand – and yet he chose to let them live. No doubt the man he had let escape would have told the others that inside this room there was no one other than a man, a woman, and a bleeding hostage – none of them older than twenty two. At least now we had a hostage – that should give them some incentive not to blast the door down, although I bet they were considering it.
I heard a heavy metallic knock on the door, and the sound of a muffled voice. “Open the door! There’s no escape for you so you might as well give up.”
Aizel lifted his head but he was still treating the guard’s hand with a bandage. “This’ll only take but a moment, my dear gentlemen! Please show some patience.” He looked over to me and mouthed the words, hurry up.
The men behind the door stopped for a while and I began to get a bad feeling. The computer was loading something and it was taking far too long. And then I heard a new and yet terribly familiar voice – that slow serpent sound. “Is that you in there, Miss Abigail?”
Lace. The anger hit me like a flash flood, and if I had it my way I would have opened that door, took out my gun and put a bullet between his eyes.
“Lace,” Aizel shouted back at him, “we have one of your men hostage. If you try to blow down the door I’ll have no choice but to kill him.
“Have it your way,” Lace said calmly. “I must say, Miss Abigail, you are incredibly persistent – you remind me so much of your father. I trust you’ll compensate for murdering my interrogator – he was the best in the city and one of my most loyal men.”467Please respect copyright.PENANA5KmFABkEl0
And I’d kill him again if I had to, I thought grimly.
Aizel suddenly looked at me with a seriously desperate shimmer in his eyes. “Abigail, tell me you’re almost done!”
“The system is almost up and running. Then I’ll just have to punch in the code and activate the thingy.”
“Well hurry, because if that door goes down while ATLAS is active, then we just helped Lace win the—”
The explosion caught everyone off guard, and it ripped the door open as if the massive metal lock had never existed. A cloud of smoke shrouded the blast area, and then half a dozen men stormed into the terminal room, followed by President Lace. I saw Aizel make a move to execute the hostage, but then his face tensed up and he threw his gun to the ground. He stepped back a few paces and I saw in his eyes that we had been defeated.
“I knew you didn’t have the stomach to execute a hostage, Aizel Barrette.”
Lace moved to the front of the line, thinking that he was safe because we were unarmed, but even though I did have a weapon of my own, we were still outnumbered.
“If you did have the guts to pull the trigger then you wouldn’t have let his little buddy go – a poor move on your behalf.”
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